The Fishheart Ruby

by Sam Belleneuve

in Issue 160, May 2025

Axad moored his dinghy to the arm-long spur of rock that reached straight up from the water near the edge of the barren, craggy island that rose in the center of Lake Mreehan. The spur happened to mark the location of the relatively safer of the two entrances—the one without, as Axad’s employer laughingly put it, a “guard dog.”

Dwaneer was always laughing. Axad’s return bearing the Fishheart Ruby would probably not stun him into silence. An empty-handed return would surely provoke the laughter of derision. Not to return? Axad imagined even that might inspire the little fat man to mirth. The thought set his mouth into a sullen line.

For now the salt lake stretched a mile in every direction, leaving Axad wholly alone. Dwaneer was a great listener to rumors, and the latest rumor was that a rival thief called Nemon had designs on the Fishheart. But Nemon—unless he was the unfortunate owner of an unmanned rowboat Axad had earlier spotted on the glassy waters—was nowhere in evidence.

Axad doffed his wide-brimmed sunhat and stripped off the white cloak he wore against the blazing late-morning sun. He crouched in the boat: a bronzed and black-haired figure, loins girt, a utility knife strapped to his calf, otherwise naked and unarmed. Then, with a final deep inspiration of the strong-smelling salt air, he plunged into the water and began the long swim through the submerged passage that led to the cave inside the island.

The water was cloudy, but the passage was straight enough that he could find his way by touch. He finally felt it widen and curve upward, and he opened his eyes to see light filtering through the water. Not sunlight, but something wan and multi-hued: wizards’ lamps, still glowing steadily even though their creator was generations dead. They, along with an airstone, were enough to make even a sealed cave into an inhabitable—and very secret—workshop.

His head broke water and he heaved himself, dripping, onto the flat stone floor that surrounded the pool in the center of the huge, single-chambered cave.

The first thing he noticed was the smell, an oppressive meaty putrescence. The next thing he noticed was the sheer number of corpses—two dozen or so—that littered the bare floor. Most were mummified, their clothing uncannily intact in the salty, verminless space. Others seemed fresher. Two, in particular, caught his eye. One, little more than a skeleton, was dressed in clothing two centuries out of date. It wore a signet ring with the device of a toothfish skewered on two lightning bolts. This was the seal of Ghiraxis, the erstwhile owner of the Fishheart—the wizard whose cave this had been.

The other was no more than two days dead, with a blue, swollen face and red-spotted eyelids that told Axad he had suffocated. Despite his distorted features, Axad recognized him as Nemon.

Axad swallowed to settle his stomach. The corpses told a disquieting story, but he was reluctant to turn back before even beginning his search. He picked his way past them, toward the furnishings that ringed the outer wall.

The lamps—head-sized half-spheres in many colors—clustered over the irregular ceiling like a deposit of eggs. Axad squinted up at them and saw, in the thin rocky space between a blue lamp and a yellow one, a spot of brighter gold. The weather, it seemed, had worn a hole in the roof, for sunlight streamed down. A dead man lay on the ground below, dressed in a short green tunic, red hair still clinging to his desiccated head. The falling sunlight painted a small, pale patch on his bony haunch.

Axad reached the wall and worked his way around the perimeter,  methodically rifling the shelves and chests, finding nothing but moldering papers and parchments, corroded implements, and a few colored stones. He doubted the stones were valuable—none of them approached the size or teardrop shape of the Fishheart—but he slipped a few into his fine net waist-pouch for future examination.

Even here there were a few skeletal forms, collapsed with their hands still groping the furniture. Axad shuddered as he moved aside one withered hand and found a lockpick in it. The thief had succeeded in opening the drawer, but the codexes within were so neatly stacked that he had evidently died before he could disturb them.

The air felt close—a little closer than could be accounted for only by the smell of decay. When Axad reached the wizard’s bed, he realized why. On the headboard of the little bunk hung the airstone-holder: a tin receptacle, wholly sealed except for a tiny hole at the end of a spout. Axad held his hand to the hole and felt no blowing. He shook the can and heard a tiny, gravel-like rattle. The airstone was spent; the only fresh air in the cave was coming from the opening in the roof.

Had all the others died from lack of air? It was conceivable: any who had entered after the airstone ran out, but before the roof wore through, would have succumbed quickly. But that didn’t explain Nemon. Nor—unless the wizard had been very careless indeed—did it explain Ghiraxis himself.

As he made his way further along the wall, Axad noticed lamplight glinting on a second, smaller pool that clung to the edge of the space, close to the red-headed corpse. By now the patch of sunlight had moved to the figure’s head, which lay at the edge of an odd expanse of chalky dark-blue stone that made up part of the floor of the cave. A deep, smooth trench, no wider than the sun-patch itself, cut through the field of blue.

As Axad approached the pool, something stirred. He stepped back, squinting into the cloudy, rippling water. A dark form moved under the surface, and as it passed Axad had an impression of tattered fins, a humpbacked body, teeth protruding from a mouth too small to contain them, staring eyes with a long, obscene protuberance jutting up between them, like a skinny human arm with its hand balled into a fist. A gleaming crimson tooth jutted out from the fist-like bulge. The creature was as long as Axad was tall; it might have been thrice his weight. The shaking water threw up a putrid smell of marine death.

This must be the “guard dog” that made the second underwater entrance impossible, despite its shortness, to traverse.

Worktables and more storage stood against the walls beyond the pool. Axad picked his way past the dead men—but as he passed the one touched by the sun, he noticed something disturbing. The sun had crept off the man’s red hair, into the trench that cut across the patch of blue floor, and a white mist seeped up from where it touched.

A sharp smell rose into the air, a smell like beer vinegar. Not alarming in itself, but at this strength—and accompanied by white vapor—it could only mean one thing: deadly aneride! Two more breaths of it would kill him.

Axad’s mouth tightened. His eyes roved the cave. The dead men lay in every quarter of it: none had escaped the gas. His only chance was to dive into the passage by which he had entered. The pool in the center lay some twenty paces away. He wheeled, prepared to vault over the corpses in his way—but before he could take a step, reports sounded and a series of sharp blows drove into his right hip. The stones in his pouch were exploding!

In his pain and frustration, he drew a hissing breath. The smell of aneride filled his lungs and he was seized with a tremor that threw him down atop the red-headed corpse, his face against its leathery cheek. Before his eyes, white mist streamed from the sun-raked trench in the blue floor. Gradually the shaking subsided and his limbs became his own again. His chest ached.

Behind his back, the little edge-pool burbled.

It was his only chance. He rolled over and plunged in.

The cloudy, dark water closed over him. He held his eyes wide open, straining toward what looked like sunlight. He sensed a huge dark figure approaching from his left. The glow of sunlight was masked by dark bars: a gridiron, the bars two thumb-breadths wide, the openings larger than his head. He surged toward it, heedless of the thing that loomed behind him. Fixing fingers and feet on the rotten, rusty bars, he climbed upward toward the sun. At the very top, where metal socketed into stone, his fingers reached out and touched cool air. He thrust his head through, and his eyes looked out on the glittering expanse of the lake, but his nose did not clear the waterline. The sight of air seemed to redouble his hunger for it. He ducked back out of the gridiron, twisted, thrust his head out again face-up, and breathed deeply of the cool, sweet, sharp salt air.

Then he was dragged back underwater. Rough pain engulfed his right foot. He kicked away, his skin tearing away agonizingly in the saltwater. The monster hovered before him with goggling black eyes and a mouthful of gray teeth as sharp and irregular as stalagmites. The obscene arm-like appendage axed down toward him. He jerked back, dodging the single red tooth that glowed in the filtered sunlight.

The rapid movement of water seemed to disorient the thing. In that, it resembled the sharks he had once fought in the eastern port of Tarn. Most likely it, too, was vulnerable at the gills. Quickly, before it could regain its bearings, he drew his feet back and planted them on the dark head to either side of the arm-like appendage’s roots. His torn foot smarted against the rough skin. He ignored it and seized the appendage, which strained—boneless, gristly, and muscular—in his grip. He was out of reach of the teeth now, and all that remained was to work his way onto the creature’s back. Blood billowed from his foot, darkening the already turbid water.

Suddenly the thing rammed itself forward with terrible speed. In a blink he realized it meant to crush him against the gridiron. He pushed off with his feet and spun, his hands twisting around the gristly appendage with a rough, muffled sound. He did not land cleanly on the thing’s back, but floated above it, holding on only with his hands. The appendage pulsed and whipped, but his sheer weight was sufficient to dampen its force; it jerked him, but could not throw him off. He locked his left elbow around it and drew out his knife from its sheath.

With every downward jerk of the appendage, he slashed and dug at the creature’s gill-slits, shredding the loose, feathery flesh. His lips drew back, teeth bared against the dirty water. The air-hunger was on him again; it made him savage—and decisive.

After what felt like minutes of hacking, he at last felt the muscles of the appendage slacken under him. He made two final blows—pinpoint strikes at the creature’s black eyes—and swam for the gridiron. He put out his head, took a deep breath, and then ducked back into the underwater grotto, his back to the metal bars, watching the monster’s body.

For minutes, interrupted only by occasional gulps of air, he observed it. Gore still seeped from its ruined gills. The flaccid appendage hung forward like a lock of lank hair. In the aftermath of the fight, the water surged in gradually diminishing waves, and the tooth of the appendage knocked against the needle-teeth that clustered the mouth.

At length, he was satisfied that it was dead, and he turned his attention to the rusty gridiron that blocked the way out. The corrosion was worst just below the waterline, so his best hope for escape was to work the upper parts of the bars until they broke. Returning through the dry cave was not an option: with such poor ventilation, the deadly gas would take a day or more to clear.

He could always wait it out in the boat, then go in after the ruby again. A cloth laid over the blue patch would keep the sunlight from breeding more aneride. He might even backtrack to the nearest town and try to trade for an airstone—if one could be found. That would cut into his profit, but it was the surest path. Better by far than returning unsuccessful and provoking his employer’s ignorant contempt.

As he thought these things, he worried at the bars, and soon he turned to wondering about their history. Ghiraxis himself had most likely installed them, and the most sensible reason for it was to keep his guard dog on a chain. Which implied that it, or the line of its ancestors, had remained imprisoned in a shallow grotto for two lonely centuries.

Captivity was one thing—but never to have been free? Axad turned toward the carcass once more, and with a vague stirring of pity he watched it bobbing in the water, illuminated by the angled sunlight from the top of the grate.

Then it moved.

The head dipped, the tail jerked high. Axad flattened himself against the bars. In a moment he realized what was happening. It was floating upward, as dead fish do—but something prevented it from turning belly-up. Something was weighing down its head.

He angled his face out of the bars for another breath of air and then dove to investigate. The thing’s appendage still hung straight down, swaying heavily. The weight was in its end, in the bulbous flesh that surrounded the red tooth. A shaft of sunlight broke in, touching the water with milky whiteness, making the tooth glow pink until it no longer seemed like an animal growth, but like gemstone embedded in rock.

Axad’s eyes widened. He lunged at the appendage, caught the stony head in one great fist, and hacked it off with his knife. Then he swam up into the light and, with eager but steady fingers, cut and stripped the bark-like flesh to reveal a stone big as a hand, its shape a distorted teardrop, its color a deep, transparent crimson.

The Fishheart Ruby!

***

Dwaneer was—though his shaven pate and soft, lotioned skin made it hard to determine—probably no older than Axad. Nonetheless, he greeted him with an avuncular “My boy!”

Axad restrained himself from limping as he strode across the deep carpet. His hair was newly plaited, his body swathed in a silk robe, his torn foot expertly bandaged by one of his employer’s medical retainers.

He owed his freedom to Dwaneer, and therefore tolerated more from him than he would from any other man. Even this damned rigmarole.

The little man rose from his pillowed divan, lit from behind by needles of sunlight from the finely perforated pearwood shutters. “Come, sit with me,” he said, and bustled over to a lamplit alcove. Axad sat in a large, cushioned chair at a little round table. The three walls of the alcove were covered with glass-fronted cabinets displaying dozens of cameo-carved eggshells, some of them larger than his head.

A pot of tea steamed in the center of the table, reeking of rose petals. Dwaneer poured two little cups. Axad knew that the roses were to cover the bitterness of padoc. His foot still ached so badly that he would have welcomed a dose of the narcotic even if the way of gratitude had not demanded he accept it.

Dwaneer leaned toward him, eyes glittering. “First, tell me the story.”

Axad took a sip of the bitter tea. “I searched the cave. It wasn’t there. I jumped into a pool to escape a hazard. There I fought a great fish. I found it on the fish’s body.”

Dwaneer pouted. “If you don’t learn to tell a better story than that, I’ll have to hire a bard to follow you around.”

Axad, unsmiling, drew the Fishheart from the breast of his robe.

Dwaneer seized it, his eyes transfixed by the red fire in its depths. “Ah, more brilliant than I hoped! I have great plans for this.”

“Do tell,” Axad said, though he knew his employer needed no encouragement.

“I am creating an anatomical cabinet—all gemstones, you understand. A heart is a good beginning. Next I believe I’ll go after the petrified brain of Ech-Huan, the sage of the Langmeer Forest—another job for you, if you want it.” He looked at Axad sidewise, almost insinuatingly. “You may not tell much of a story, my boy, but you do deliver the goods.”

Axad took another sip of tea. And perhaps it was only creeping intoxication that brought the ghost of a smile to his lips as Dwaneer raised the ruby—and turned it in the glittering lamplight—and laughed.

© May 2025, Sam Belleneuve

Sam Belleneuve is a fantasy writer living near Dayton, Ohio.  This is their first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.